Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/141

 career, the ‘Spectator’ was selling ten thousand per week, and Steele himself says that the first four volumes had obtained it a further sale of nine thousand copies in book form (No. 555). What is clear is that Addison's assistance was still anonymous, and Steele's gratitude to him as strong as ever. ‘I am indeed,’ he wrote, ‘much more proud of his long-continued friendship than I should be of the fame of being thought the author of any writings he is capable of producing. … I heartily wish that what I have done here were as honorary to that sacred name [of friendship] as learning, wit, and humanity render those pieces which I have taught the reader now to distinguish for his’—i.e. by the letters C, L, I, O.

During the progress of the ‘Spectator,’ Steele had made his first definite plunge as a politician by ‘The Englishman's Thanks to the Duke of Marlborough.’ This appeared in January 1712, just after the duke had been deprived of all his offices, a catastrophe which also prompted Swift's opposition ‘Fable of Midas.’ There were other signs of political disquiet in some of Steele's subsequent contributions to the ‘Spectator’ (‘he has been mighty impertinent of late,’ wrote Swift to Stella in July 1712); and although in the new periodical, which he began in March 1713, he made profession of abstinence from matters of state, only seven days before he had put forth a ‘Letter to Sir Miles Wharton concerning Occasional Peers.’ In the ‘Guardian’ he philosophically declared himself to be, with regard to government of the church, a tory; and with regard to the state, a whig. But he was, in Johnson's phrase, ‘too hot for neutral topics;’ and before the middle of 1713 he was actively embroiled with the ‘Examiner,’ the casus belli being an attack that tory paper (behind which was the formidable figure of Swift) had made in its No. 41 upon Lord Nottingham's daughter, Lady Charlotte Finch, the Nottinghams having deserted to the whigs. On 4 June he resigned his commissionership of stamps, and his pension as Prince George's gentleman-in-waiting, and entered the lists of faction with an indictment of the government upon the vexed question of the postponed demolition, under the treaty of Utrecht, of the Dunkirk fortifications. ‘The British nation,’ he declared, ‘expects the demolition of Dunkirk’ (Guardian, No. 128). The ‘Examiner’ retorted by charging him with disloyalty. Steele rejoined (22 Sept.) by a pamphlet entitled ‘The Importance of Dunkirk consider'd,’ addressed to the bailiff of Stockbridge, Hampshire, for which town in August he had been elected M.P. Swift answered by a bitterly contemptuous ‘Importance of the Guardian consider'd.’ Before this came out, however, on 31 Oct. the ‘Guardian’ had been dead for a month, and had been succeeded on 6 Oct. by the ‘Englishman,’ ‘a sequel’ of freer political scope.

By this time Steele was in the thick of party strife. In November a scurrilous ‘Character’ of him ‘by Toby Abel's kinsman’ (i.e. Edward King, nephew of Abel Roper of the ‘Postboy’) was issued by some of Swift's ‘under spur-leathers,’ and early in January 1714 Swift himself followed suit with a paraphrase of Horace (ii. 1), in which it was suggested that when he (Steele) had settled the affairs of Europe, he might find time to finish his long-threatened (but unidentified) play. Shortly afterwards (19 Jan.) Steele put forth another widely circulated pamphlet, ‘The Crisis,’ in which, aided by the counsels of Addison, Hoadly, William Moore of the Inner Temple, and others, he reviewed the whole question of the Hanoverian succession. Swift was promptly in the field (23 Feb.) with the ‘Public Spirit of the Whigs,’ one of his most masterly efforts in this way; and when Steele took his seat in parliament he found that his doom was sealed, and on 12 March he was formally accused of uttering seditious libels. Supported by Walpole, Addison, General Stanhope, and others of his party, he spoke in his own defence for some three hours, and spoke well; but what he afterwards called, with pardonable energy, ‘the insolent and unmanly sanction of a majority’ (Apology, p. xvi) prevailed, and on 18 March 1714 he was expelled the House of Commons.

In these circumstances he turned once more to his proper vocation—letters. Even at the end of 1714 he had contrived to issue a volume of ‘Poetical Miscellanies,’ dedicated to Congreve, and numbering Pope, Gay, and Parnell among its contributors. In this he reprinted his own ‘Procession’ of 1695. The short-lived ‘Englishman’ came to an end in February 1714, and was immediately succeeded by the ‘Lover’ (25 Feb.). In April came the ‘Reader.’ Both of these were dropped in May. In No. 6 of the latter Steele announced that he was preparing a ‘History of the War in Flanders,’ a subject for which he was not without qualifications. But the project came to nothing. He produced, however, several pamphlets: the ‘Romish Ecclesiastical History of late Years’ (25 May), a ‘Letter concerning the Bill for preventing the Growth of Schism’ (3 June), and another on Dunkirk (2 July). Then, on 1 Aug., Queen Anne died. On 18 Sept.